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A long-legged bird of prey with an appetite for snakes and a phenomenal, skull-crushing kick. “Their desire to kick anything that moves and looks a bit like a snake is so innate,” says Portugal. “At the end of a session, I had this long extension lead and I started wheeling it in. Within a fraction of a second, the bird was on it and going mental, trying to kick the extension lead to death. It felt like I was playing with a cat.”
An object doesn’t even need to look like a snake. “You should see what it did to my folder,” says Portugal. “It wasn’t trying to eat it. It was more: What’s this in my aviary? Their default option if they don’t want to mate with it, or raise it, is to kick it.”The latter, according to one dubious-sounding hypothesis, look like the quill pens that secretaries once tucked behind their ears—hence the bird’s name. A more plausible alternative is that “secretary” is a bastardization of the Arabic “saqr-et-tair” for “hunter bird.”
The bird’s hunting technique is simple: Find prey, flush it out, and stamp the living crap out of it. It does so with improbably long legs, which look like a crane’s legs glommed onto an eagle’s body. With unerring accuracy, it brings these down onto rodents, lizards, small birds, and snakes—typically on the head.
An object doesn’t even need to look like a snake. “You should see what it did to my folder,” says Portugal. “It wasn’t trying to eat it. It was more: What’s this in my aviary? Their default option if they don’t want to mate with it, or raise it, is to kick it.”The latter, according to one dubious-sounding hypothesis, look like the quill pens that secretaries once tucked behind their ears—hence the bird’s name. A more plausible alternative is that “secretary” is a bastardization of the Arabic “saqr-et-tair” for “hunter bird.”
The bird’s hunting technique is simple: Find prey, flush it out, and stamp the living crap out of it. It does so with improbably long legs, which look like a crane’s legs glommed onto an eagle’s body. With unerring accuracy, it brings these down onto rodents, lizards, small birds, and snakes—typically on the head.
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